Photo transfer programs are found wanting

We found a bug in our Android Ice Cream Sandwich. All we wanted to do was transfer photos from our camera to the Web. But since we didn’t have Jelly Bean, the latest Android system, things didn’t go sweetly.

All over the Web, we’ve seen similar complaints from people just trying to use Android’s Picasa photo editor to upload photos. The message they get is: “Failed to retrieve account information.” There are fixes for this, but they get complicated. Many require you to kill your account with LinkedIn, which is important to users who want to contact colleagues and look for work.

So we turned to Google+, once called the Facebook killer. Google+ claims to make it easy to upload photos in one swoop. But our results made us laugh. Google looked at 90 photos we’d taken recently and flagged 84 of them as “inappropriate.” We guess that means they were pornographic or offensive in some way. They were pictures of new snow, Joy’s 90-year-old aunt having dinner and a woman’s club banquet. Pretty racy stuff. The screen message read: “There’s something about these photos that may not be allowed.” Maybe it’s because they were too boring.

On to Shutterfly, a leading photo site. A free app called ShutterFolio Upload lets you upload your photos all at once. It worked well, but we wanted the photos on our computer, not just on the Shutterfly site. But like many commercial sites, Shutterfly doesn’t let you download photos in full resolution.

As our savvy readers will undoubtedly point out, you can also transfer photos to your computer using a data cable and then upload them to the Web. But this is no good when you’re out and about without your computer. Anyway, we lost our cable and have ordered a replacement.

We tried emailing the photos to ourselves by tapping the Gallery app, then “select item” and choosing a bunch. But here we ran into Gmail’s attachment limits.

We next turned to Dropbox. Dropbox gives you two free gigabytes of free online storage space. But after it was running for a few days, our Bullguard anti-virus program found a Trojan virus that got to us through Dropbox. So we uninstalled it.

We finally turned to Google Drive, which gives you 10 gigabytes of private online storage. From there, it’s easy to download photos back into your computer. Hooray, we got those racy photos back. (Ironically, the next day Google+ stopped flagging them.)

We also used a free app called Picasa Tool, but were somewhat disconcerted by the ads, including one offering “chats with naughty girls.” So you can have chats with naughty girls but no photos of old ladies having dinner.

A reader contacted us after we wrote about fabulous freebies and asked: “What about a safe, free cookie cleaner?” Well, we have one of those.

Cookies are bits of computer code that advertisers insert into Web pages so they can hit you with a “buy now” message later. The best free program we know of to get rid of these and other junk is CCleaner from Piriform.com. It’s been downloaded more than 1 billion times, so somebody else must like it.

After installing CCleaner, click “yes” to let it save settings. Then ignore the “analyze” button, leave the boxes that are already checked and click “run cleaner.” This will get rid of the cookies.

Last thought: Some cookies are useful. These are little bits that mark programs you go to frequently so they will load quicker next time around. If you happen to delete these, that program will put them back again when you next go there; you’ll just have to wait a little longer or re-enter a password.

The other day Joy recommended Lenovo computers to a friend. “Lenovo?” she questioned. “That’s an obscure one.” Not really. Lenovo bought IBM’s personal computer business some years back and has been getting good reviews ever since. It’s coming out with a “convertible laptop” this quarter.

The Lenovo Thinkpad Helix is a tablet and PC in one. At first glance, it looks like an ordinary laptop, but the screen lifts off and can be carried away as a separate tablet. Whether this appeals to you depends on how much you’re willing to spend. The $1,500 price tag is $500 more than you’d pay for a tablet and laptop separately.

But if weight is a consideration, a convertible laptop may be worth the price. For instance, the combined weight of the iPad 3 and a typical laptop is around 5 pounds. The Lenovo convertible is only 3.7 pounds. On the downside, it comes with Windows 8, which takes some getting used to, to say the least. The unpopularity of Windows 8 is confirmed by the fact that in December, only 1.7 percent of those browsing the Web were using Windows 8. At a comparable point in the life of Windows 7, new users had already reached 6.8 percent, according to research firm Net Applications.

A Forrester Research Report estimates that Apple will sell $39 billion dollars’ worth of iPads and Macs over the next two years. This year alone, they are expected to sell $11 billion dollars’ worth of iPads and $7 billion dollars’ worth of Macs. That sounds like a lot, but their market share has been dropping and that may accelerate. Apple’s share of the smartphone market has dropped from 23 percent to around 15 percent over the past year. Samsung’s market share, on the other hand, has tripled over the past two years, from 9 percent to 31 percent. Apple is hoping a cheaper iPhone with brightly colored cases can recover lost share.

A new service from Vonage lets you receive calls in selected European countries for free.

Vonage Roam lets you receive cellphone calls over Wi-Fi, as well as 3G and 4G cellular networks in the United Kingdom, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. When you’re traveling elsewhere, you can still avoid those awful roaming charges by using the app.

Roam is part of the Vonage Mobile app we use here in the U.S. It lets us make calls locally and internationally without spending any of the minutes in our cellphone’s T-Mobile plan. The key is the other person must also have downloaded the app, unless they’re already a Vonage customer. Since it’s free, why not? Go to VonageMobile.com and have a link sent to your phone via text message. The app works for both text and voice.

Talk about times changing: After growing up with AT&T, we haven’t used their phone service in years. Instead, our landline phone uses Vonage, which is much cheaper. Vonage is similar to Skype in that it uses the Internet to make calls, and calls between fellow users are free. We tried both services, but Vonage quality was better in our area. Using Skype to call another Skype user works great, but quality varies when calling a regular phone. Our Vonage service costs $15 a month before taxes. (And boy, does the government pour on the taxes.)

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